Gabble Ratchet retweeted
What is that supposed to prove? Not only is imperialism and concern over NATO expansion and the resulting exclusion from the post-Cold War security architecture not mutually inconsistent, as people have been pointing out for years to no avail, but Putin also complains about NATO expansion all the time to justify the invasion.
The fact that people lie and pretend he never mentions it, like when he did his interview with Carlson (philippelemoine.com/p/what-p…), doesn't change the fact that he does and consistently so, yet I don't see anyone on the NATO doesn't matter side of that debate conclude that it's why he invaded Ukraine.
We know he's held the view that Ukraine was not a real country and that large swathes of it were really Russian lands jumbled together with other lands by the Bolsheviks for decades, and we also know that such views have been widespread in the Russian foreign policy establishment for even longer (you should read what Yeltsin's press secretary was saying in August 1991), yet there is no evidence that anyone in the Russian government was seriously considering invading Ukraine until much more recently.
You can have this sort of view about Ukraine, yet think it's preferable not to revise post-1991 borders, which indeed was the position of the Russian foreign policy establishment and Putin until 2014. In fact, as I pointed out in the article I linked to above, that's a point Putin himself has explicitly made in his interview with Carlson and elsewhere. You don't have to accept his narrative to acknowledge the logical point and you don't have to distort what he said by claiming he doesn't even mention NATO expansion to criticize that narrative.
My view, to cut a long story short, is that NATO expansion and more generally the deterioration of relations with the West have made the dispute with Ukraine, which has its own dynamic, look much more threatening in Moscow and played a major role in making Putin choose a course of actions in 2014 and 2022 that he would never have seriously entertained earlier.
I think there is a strong case for that view, which I intend to make in some detail (that's obviously not a topic that can be seriously discussed in a tweet), but I'm not even asking that people agree with me. I'm just asking that people don't commit obvious fallacies like claiming that Putin's reply to Zelensky shows that NATO expansion was irrelevant or distort the record by falsely claiming that he doesn't even mention it.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
Let’s be clear:
If I’m not going to sleep with you, I don’t need to know anything about your sexuality.
And children—who are not going to sleep with anyone—certainly don’t.
Your sexuality is not sacred. It’s not a personality, it’s not a protected class of performance art, and it’s not the center of anyone’s moral universe but your own. Unless we are in a relationship, I am not obligated to acknowledge, affirm, or be exposed to your private desires—especially not in public, and especially not in front of children.
This used to be understood. Now it’s called hate.
No, We Don’t Owe You an Audience
Sexuality belongs in the private realm. It is intimate by definition. If you feel compelled to wear your kink on your sleeve—or on a float, or in a first-grade classroom—you are not inviting understanding, you are demanding submission. You are violating others’ right not to participate.
Consent doesn’t vanish because your fetish is “progressive.” If anything, the burden is higher.
No one consents to being flashed on the subway. No one consents to a stranger’s arousal. No one consents to a stranger telling their child about masturbation, kink, gender identity, or pornographic categories under the guise of “inclusive sex ed.” Yet all of this is happening now—in public parks, in classrooms, in televised programming.
It is not tolerance. It is invasion.
Children Are Not Here to Validate You
Children are not queer. Children are not sexual. Children do not need to “see themselves represented” in a spectrum of adult desire. This idea—that identity is only valid if sexualized and mirrored—is narcissism, not pedagogy.
There is no legitimate reason to initiate a child into the language of sexual preference, gender identity, or alternative lifestyles. The only people who benefit from that dynamic are those looking to normalize boundary violations.
Let me state it plainly:
Children who are not going to have sex do not need to be exposed to sexuality.
Period.
Any adult who insists otherwise is not confused. They are grooming.
Public Fetishism Is Not Liberation
There is a vast difference between being gay and demanding the right to simulate sex acts in front of children. Between being transgender and insisting on teaching kindergartners about breast removal. Between being proud of who you are and insisting the whole world observe your kink play in the street.
This is not diversity. This is decay.
Men in dog masks being walked on leashes by their lovers are not brave—they are forcing strangers into their psychodrama. This is exhibitionism, and when children are present, it becomes criminal exhibitionism.
We used to know this. Peeping, flashing, voyeurism—these were considered red flags. Dangerous behaviors. Early signs of escalation. Now they’re filmed, hashtagged, and funded by public grants.
Stop Calling It Love—It’s Entitlement
This is not about who you love. It’s about how you demand to be seen. If you need the entire public to witness, applaud, and adapt to your sexuality, you’re not a pioneer—you’re an emotional colonizer.
Love does not demand a captive audience. It does not parade past toddlers. It does not demand that schools teach four-year-olds about “preferred pronouns.” Love protects children. Love guards modesty. Love waits.
And if you can’t wait—if you need to be seen, affirmed, and obeyed—you’re not talking about love. You’re talking about power.
Consent Applies to Culture, Too
We teach children that consent is sacred—so why are we failing to apply that lesson to public life?
No child consents to drag queen story hour.
No parent consents to leather harnesses on city floats.
No woman consents to being exposed to male sexuality in the ladies’ room, or in the school library, or anywhere she cannot opt out.
Consent is not just for sex. It’s for everything.
Attention. Language. Presence. Ideology. Imagery.
And we are done pretending we don’t notice when it’s violated.
The boundary is back.
And we are drawing it in bold.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
I paid a large chunk of my income to Medicare and Social Security over the last 45 years. The funny thing is that I could probably be convinced to not take as much as I was promised as a part of a larger reform that would permanently fix Social Security.
I have to tell you that when you get mad at me for being successful and then expect me to give up what I was promised just because you’re sad, that’s when I become absolutely unwilling to part with a single cent. You’re going to pay me everything you owe me, whether I need it or not – and I don’t need it.
Try not being a jerk. You might get some of what you want. But you come at me jealous because I’m successful and want to take what’s mine? Are you high? Here’s my counteroffer.
Nothing
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that this doesn't happen in Poland.
🔴🇫🇷🔥 ALERTE INFO | Le clocher de la mairie de Limoges s’est effondré. xitter.cf/Xirthe_v1/status/21115…
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
Democrats discovered billionaires in politics were a threat to democracy the exact day one stopped writing them checks.
When Michael Bloomberg spent around $1 billion of his own money in the 2020 primary, then another $100M to help Biden in Florida, nobody called it an attack on democracy.
When George Soros put $125M into a single Democratic super PAC and became the largest political donor of the 2022 cycle, it was "civic engagement."
When Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, JB Pritzker and Tom Steyer wrote eight- and nine-figure checks cycle after cycle, it was "saving democracy." When Bill Gates reportedly gave around $50M to a pro-Harris group in 2024, silence.
In 2020, dark money groups spent over $500M backing Democrats, more than double what went to Republicans. In 2024, Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion in under three months. Democrats outspent Republicans and lost.
So the problem was never billionaires in politics. The problem is a billionaire who doesn't fund your side.
And here's what nobody in DC wants to say out loud: old billionaire money is quiet money. It funds the foundations, NGOs, think tanks and consultants that make up the permanent establishment. It doesn't challenge the system. It is the system. It freezes the picture: same insiders, same incumbents, same experts, every single cycle.
You can like or hate Musk's spending, but at least it's out in the open. If you really want money out of politics, start with your own party's donor list.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
A lot of uneducated people fall into this capitalism vs public trap. So let me explain why the "public" side of this debate comes down to one thing: it doesn't work.
And it's not because the State is evil. It's because the State is made of people. Same people as everywhere else. Same incentives, same laziness, same temptations. The only difference is whose money they're spending.
Milton Friedman nailed it. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you watch the price and the quality. Your money on someone else: you watch the price, less the quality. Someone else's money on yourself: you stop caring about the price. Someone else's money on someone else: you care about neither. Every public budget on earth lives in that fourth box.
Now let me explain it like you're 8. Picture a schoolyard. 100 kids, Pokémon cards handed out at random. Nobody plans anything. Kids trade, collectors sort, good players accumulate. Very quickly every card ends up with the kid who values it most. Then the teacher walks in, decides it's unfair, confiscates everything and redistributes it herself. Problem: she has no idea who wants what. She can't. Nobody can. Trades stop, good players quit, and somehow the kids sitting closest to her desk end up with all the rare cards.
That last part is the one everyone forgets. When money flows from a central desk instead of voluntary trade, the winners are the people who know the desk best. Lobbyists, connected contractors, consultants billing 10x. California high-speed rail: budget tripled, still no train. That's not a bug, it's what happens every single time someone spends money that isn't theirs, on people they'll never meet, with zero consequences if they fail.
And here's the irony in your take. The capitalists who love public infrastructure the most are the cronies who win the contracts. That's not the free market. That's the exact opposite of it.
The free market is the only system where bad allocators lose their money and good allocators get more to allocate. Profit is the signal. Losses are the correction. The State has neither. A failing company goes bankrupt. A failing ministry gets a bigger budget next year.
So if you actually care about the common good, you should want more free market, not less. Freedom means the freedom to build, to trade, to keep what you create. It does not mean the freedom to hand other people's money to people who've proven they don't know how to invest it.
The question was never capitalism vs public. It's who allocates the next dollar best. 200 years of data, same answer every time.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
War at the Journal
I’ve never seen a greater disconnect from reality in covering the news.
Front page WSJ: the caption calls the stabbing co-pilot “a rogue pilot.” Rogue? No use of the words “high jacking” or “terrorist.” Quite a cad this rogue.
Article says no clear motive but there are “troubling possibilities”
Then comes this doozy of a paragraph:
“Negotiations to end the war that Israel and the U.S. launched against Iran appear stalled, and anger runs high over Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”
No mention here of Oct. 7th, Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran’s link to terrorism in the UK yesterday — clearly the US or Israel must be to blame for this incident.
Contrast the editorial inside at the same moment with the headline about how brave passengers averted a “highjacking” and calling the stabber a “terrorist” and putting it in the context of the Iranian actions, threats and history of terrorism.
It seems if you want the news straight you need to read the Ed page and I’m at a loss as to the game being played on the front page, but there are “troubling possibilities.”
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
what if I told you these cartoons *were* made for children, it's just that children weren't such pussies back then
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
Social media is a sewer because dishonest people dig out the worst example from their political opposition and pretend its representative of everyone else.
Then everyone else gets sucked into the dumb debate.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
California has spent ALL of your money.
They spent it on bloated programs. They lost it to fraud. They handed it to political insiders. They poured it into benefits for illegal immigrants while California families were told to pay more, wait longer, and expect less.
And every chance they get, Sacramento asks for more.
The taxpayers of California are not an endless ATM for politicians who cannot—or will not—account for where our money went.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
In case you’re wondering why the nation had a record-high $432 billion budget deficit last month.
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
Go to my site
WHY I’M RUNNING FOR CALIFORNIA STATE SENATE
MY VISION FOR CALIFORNIA
I have no intention of being a legislator that does nothing. I welcome everyone UP THERE to join me and be a part of a broad coalition that is willing to work hard, call out EVERYONE that is a part of the problem and design a plan that gets ACTUAL RESULTS. That’s how I did business in the private sector beginning in sales, that in time built up a business as a visionary entrepreneur and conquered an industry at an executive level. Now I get the opportunity to do this, make California better than it’s been – one win at a time.
California is too expensive for a decent family or a young couple with a meager salary to live. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a job. Once you do find a job, there’s no guarantee that it will last. Every other day our favorite venues realize they can’t afford to stay in business. They close-up shopand cut jobs that never come back.
Crime has run rampant in California. We’ve all watched the “Smash and Grab” operations, COMMITTED IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Our current Governor-in-Thief, Newsom has done nothing. In fact, he literally fought AGAINST the effort to increase penalties, catch these thieves and hold them accountable.
The Democrats in charge are a Den of Thieves - these criminals stick together
Trans-Drug “THERAPY” for our kids paid for by our tax-dollars?!
By order of Newsom and School Administrators teachers were told not to share information with parents, that's crazy.
(It’s not therapy). I call it what it is, it’s CHILD ABUSE and pure evil.
Gavin Newsom AND School Administrators STOLE the authority to hide all this information from parents – responsible parents are the only people that should have the authority and right to make these decisions and raise their children, NOT the State! If there are exceptions to the rule they shouldn’t dictate public policy. Newsom has placed our children in direct, irreparable harm FOR LIFE.
This isn’t just the first time I’ve waded into this conversation.
I have a history of calling these abusive acts of criminal enterprise by administrators, bureaucrats and politicians out on Radio. I hope to get the chance to call them out to their faces.
Sincerely,
Mike Netter
Businessman, Taxpayer Advocate, Californian
(I will not give up on California and restoring the California Dream that we deserve.)
Gabble Ratchet retweeted
The truth is that a lot of towns can benefit significantly from the economic activity that comes with data centers.
It’s not the right call for every town, but the general opposition and fear-mongering around this is meant to ensure America falls behind in the innovation race.






































